Will Twitter's New URL Shortener Hurt SEOs?

Twitter announced they will be wrapping all links through their own URL shortener. So if you post a URL, it will automatically be shortened and passed through http://t.co/ as a URL.

I tested the URLs and they are 301 redirected, which is a good thing. But many SEOs already use a URL shortener and yes, those URLs are 301ed.

The thing is, most SEOs prefer not to chain redirect URLs. By that I mean, you do not want to 301 redirect a bit.ly URL to a t.co URL and then 301 that to a final destination URL. The more 301 redirects, the slower search engines pick up and pass through.